Author: admin

The fifth commandment is the first one in the list that turns from God toward other people — and it begins at home: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which Yahweh your God gives you” (Exodus 20:12).

Paul noticed something about it when he wrote to the Ephesians. It is “the first commandment with a promise” (Ephesians 6:2-3). God attached a blessing to it.

When a rich young man asked Jesus which commandments to keep, Jesus included this one in his answer (Matthew 19:17-19). Honoring parents was never a minor rule.

It is possible to keep the letter of a commandment and still break it. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus quoted two of the ten — “You shall not murder” and “You shall not commit adultery” — and then went straight to the heart.

Anger and contempt toward a brother already stand under judgment (Matthew 5:21-22). Looking at a woman to lust after her is adultery in the heart (Matthew 5:27-28).

This is not a new law replacing the old. Jesus had just said, “I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). He was showing what the commandments were reaching for all along — the same thing God promised through Jeremiah: a law written not on stone, but on the heart (Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10).

Paul could have listed every commandment. Instead he named four from the second table — adultery, murder, stealing, coveting — and then said they are “all summed up” in one sentence from Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

That is Romans 13:9-10. It does not make the commandments optional; it shows what they were always about. A person who truly loves a neighbor will not take his life, his marriage, his property, or his good name — and will not even want to.

Jesus said the same thing when he summed up the whole law in two commandments (Matthew 22:37-40): love God, and love your neighbor.